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Building the Future of Analytics

It has been a terrific first two months at Pentaho; the excitement from our employees, customers and partners for helping Pentaho build the future of analytics has been profound.

We believe the future of analytics is all about building a modern platform that allows business users and technologists the ability to interact with their data in an easy, visual way. The consumerization of IT requires the traditional analytics functions regarding data extraction and transformation, metrics creation, ad hoc analysis and reporting to be done in a “point and click” and “drag and drop” fashion. The latest Pentaho Business Analytics release delivers on such a premise and provides “Power to the user.”

We’ve had great feedback on how IT professionals love the visual, non-programmatic way Pentaho integrates any data source from traditional relational sources such as Oracle, SAP and MySQL, to SaaS applications like Salesforce, to non-relational sources including Hadoop, NoSQL and MPP, to analytic platforms including EMC, Teradata and IBM. Plus, the ease of all ETL functions are accomplished with a simple point and click.

Business users are free to create measures, metrics and on-the-fly reports. Deep ad hoc analysis and predictive analytical features are a drag and drop away.

Another design tenant Pentaho has built for the modern analytics platform is an open architecture and plug-in framework. We understand that our customers require freedom of choice selecting databases, plug-in end user components and web services. Pentaho’s open source heritage and extensible plug-in framework allows business users and IT professionals to easily integrate preferred components to fulfill their analytical needs.

The future of analytics is ensuring that our customers can easily gain insight from emerging technology trends including big data, Cloud computing and mobility.

Pentaho has released robust big data analytics solutions, which allow customers to truly “operationalize” big data applications. Pentaho is focused on helping customers address the biggest pain points around big data as well as the challenges of getting non-relational data in and out of Hadoop and into the hands of business users who can gain insight from reporting and ad hoc analysis. We already have several customers in the media and retail verticals who have tapped into big data for market analysis, customer sentiment and website analytics using Pentaho solutions.

Our modern technology platform was designed with Cloud computing in mind. Pentaho’s service oriented architecture allows SaaS and Cloud companies to easily embed rich analytics into their applications. Customers like Marketo, ExactTarget and Cipal have enhanced their service offerings with advanced analytics for their customers. Additionally, the Pentaho suite is integrated with common platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings, including Amazon Web Services and RackSpace for customers who would prefer to run their analytic applications in the Cloud.

We constantly strive to make our products more relevant. As our customers look to empower remote employees with better insight and analytics, Pentaho has released a rich mobile solution for tablets including the iPad.

The big idea for the future of analytics is allowing customers to freely move and easily integrate analytical applications between the traditional world of transactional, relational data and the new world of web, social and device data. The ultimate goal is to provide deep business insight by enabling users to easily mash-up data from traditional relational applications, such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, with web and social data sitting in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores.

I would be remiss not to mention that a major business design goal for the future of analytics is price performance and value. Building on our foundation of being easy to do business with from evaluation to renewal, Pentaho is continually improving its support and services. In the past year, we have added the Customer Success Team to provide additional customer service to our direct and OEM customers worldwide, created a specialized OEM services team and enhanced our support platform by migrating to Zendesk. All of this while still delivering the future of analytics at 20 percent of the cost of traditional analytics solutions from the mega vendors!

The future of analytics is here and now with Pentaho. I look forward to the journey!